How to Uninstall the About:Blank Adware HomePage Hijacker
Browser hijackers are an increasingly common and annoying phenomenon of life on the Web. One of the most common and aggressive of these is the Cool Web Search hijacker. This is a malware program that literally hijacks and redirects you to a web page that has several links on it. There are many variations of the Cool Web Search hijacker, including the About:Blank hijacker, which has several variants of its own. This constantly evolving number of variants makes it incredibly difficult to remove from your PC. But here's how to uninstall it...
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Instructions
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Download Reglite from the Internet (See "Resources" below). Reglite.exe is a pretty effective registry program, which was developed to find hidden dll files.
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Open the downloaded Reglite file and navigate to an entry called HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows.
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Next, look for the key called AppInit_DLLs. Write down the value of this key: It is the hidden DLL file that causes the About:Blank error.
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Use XP's Windows Recovery Console to rename the file. Restart your computer, booting it from the Windows XP CD. When you reach the Recovery Console, type in cd \windows\system32. Press "Enter."
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Remove the read-only attribute and replace hidden.dll with the name of the DLL file you found with RegLite. You can do this by typing attrib -r hidden.dll. Rename the hidden.dll file by typing rename hidden.dll badfile.dll. Then type "Exit" and hit "Enter" to reboot Windows.
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You will then need to remove the hidden.dll file by opening RegLite. Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows\AppInit_DLLs. Double-click the AppInit_DLLs key and delete the DLL file found in the Value Data field.
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Click "Apply," then "OK." Exit RegLite.
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Download HijackThis from the Internet (See "Resources" below). It was developed to detect and remove homepage-hijackers.
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Open and run HijackThis. It will scan the registry and display a list of entries that may have been altered by spyware. Among these, locate a DLL file called "xaiyh.dll" This is the second file causing the problem. Write it down for future reference.
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Now you need to open My Computer. Click "ToolsèFolder Options." Click the "View" tab, then click "Show Hidden Files and Folders" under the Advanced Settings section.
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Click "Start" and then "Search." Type in the name of the hidden DLL file you found with RegEdit. Remember how the file was renamed as badfile.dll with the procedure we used earlier? Search for it and delete it. Do the same thing for the DLL file you found using HijackThis. After following these steps, you should have completely removed the About:Blank hijacker.
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Tips & Warnings
You must not change any settings unless you are an advanced, experienced user.
Manually removing the About:Blank hijacker can be tricky because the hijacker will quickly reappear if the steps are not correctly followed.
